To All, the best mutual fund families from Barron's. I never look at the 1 year rankings because they are not long enough to determine quality. The 5 year and 10 year rankings are the important ones.
American Funds shined through in all the rankings. This is no surprise. Those of us who have worked in the business have always considered them the class act and any time one of our funds outperformed its American Funds counterpart, we cheered.
My two old firms, Van Kampen and Waddell& Reed did very well, ranking 6th and 8th out of 69 (odd number) of fund mgt. cos. for five years. Janus, still coasting on the gambling years, squeezed in between them. Waddell ranked 6th of 24 in the ten year list. Van Kampen wasn't on that list for some reason. Also, another firm I worked for, Fortis, seems to have fallen off the radar screen completely.
Some pretty big names are near the bottom rungs of the five year list: American Express, Aim, Putnam. I think there is big trouble in little china at at least two of these cos. But The Principal has been the worst on the five year list since the Earth was cooling. Odd, when I sent out resumes looking to see if I could find a mutual fund co. that actually wanted to make money, I got several unproductive interviews (they didn't really wanted to make money. They wanted to score high in their Morningstar box), many polite letters saying that shareholders really didn't want "absolute return" and that I needed to upgrade my approach, and one no reply at all. That was Principal. <g>
Every day I am bombarded with how good a certain brokerage firms' money managers are. I have made the comment that most of these schlubs would be booted out of Waddell or Van Kampen for leaving home without their brains. They love me at these meetings. <g> Anyway, the rankings show that I have been overly critical. They are middle of the pack. It's just that I've always worked with the creme de la creme. For example, Pioneer now ranks #2 among taxable bond fund managers. Why? Because they hired Margie Patel, who worked with me at American Capital (Van Kampen is the alias today).
Salami Brothers is actually a very good money manager, but they are nowhere on the list. I guess their number of offerings is too limited.
Anyway, one of those issues of Barron's you can't miss, despite the fact they allowed my nemesis, cub reporter Jon-Jon Laing, to write Abelson's column this week. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. <VBG> |
